Platte County commissioners this week heard a report from Evergy on ongoing power outages in Platte City.
Janet Waddell, Evergy’s manager of public affairs, spoke to commissioners Monday, March 20
“We came before the commission in December and I’m happy to report we’ve seen improved reliability,” Waddell said. “We’ve continued intensive work in the circuits that serve Platte City.”
She said the work started about a year ago and will continue for several more years, with significant investment made in the Platte City area.
Seven outages were suffered in the downtown area since early December 2022, but four of those were planned. The largest of those three unplanned outages was caused by a downed tree and was limited to 24 customers. In the rest of Platte City there were 30 outages in the same time period, with 10 of those planned. She said of the 20 unplanned outages, often very few customers were impacted.
In December, Evergy reported that in the first half of 2022, there were 44 outages in Platte City.
“Just because we’ve seen some improved reliability this isn’t a band aid effort,” Waddell said.
Efforts have been made to limit the number of customers impacted in each outage. She said work to update the Platte City circuits is only halfway done, with Tim Jones, Evergy senior manager, reporting work on the substation under the orange Platte City water tower was continuing, with redundancies scheduled for installation.
Presiding commissioner Scott Fricker asked Evergy officials for a simplified breakdown of outages, showing how many customers are affected and for how long. Commissioners would like a metric to track outages and determine if there truly is an improvement in reliability over time.
District commissioner Joe Vanover asked Evergy officials to report back in another three months.
Platte City mayor Tony Paolillo and city administrator DJ Gerht were also in attendance at the meeting, and said they had received fewer complaints from residents over the past three months since Evergy’s initial report.
“We want to hear a report from Evergy that there were no major outages in the last three months, and we want to keep hearing that report over and over again,” Vanover said. “We understand the power might go out during a tornado or an ice storm. But it’s hard to quietly suffer through power outages caused by light wind or a squirrel.”
He said county government is particularly affected by power outages in Platte City because of the concentration of government offices downtown.